dialogue with doc

Two things happened this weekend that on the face of it are unrelated, yet when I look a little deeper, I can see the connection. One was the March for Our Lives. The other was American Idol auditions.

American Idol judges (l to r) Lionel Ritchie, Katy Perry, Luke Bryan

March for Our Lives

One of the interesting things in watching American Idol, is the moment you realize the judges aren't simply looking for the best voice. Some of the people they choose from the auditions are raw, a few even make mistakes. Yet they are chosen over someone who sings perfectly. Why?

There is a quality of authenticity that eclipses simple talent. The ones who have that ability to project something that is purely themselves will move on, otherwise they get a no. Lionel Ritchie told one person he/she needed to go home and find out who they were. It wasn't a matter of performing someone else's material well, it was a matter of performing it as only he or she could.

As a writer, how often have you been told you must "find your voice?" And then thought to yourself, well how am I supposed to do that? Natalie Goldberg recommends that writers do writing practice for at least a year or two before trying stories or novels, so they can discover what obsessions they have, and how their mind works, which is in a way that no one else's mind works. Doing timed writings with a prompt, she found that the same subjects keep arising, no matter where she started.

In the past few days I've read comments from several people who seem to feel the students who initiated the march had no idea what they were doing. Yet those students were not afraid to say - we are the future, we are the solution, you have done nothing - a myriad of voices, each one of them sounding genuine, heartfelt, and very real.

I suppose, like the fish on the left, you could say many of those students were swimming against the current of the status quo - the morass that adult politicians and lobbyists slog around in, so that even the best of them find it difficult to make any headway.

Since the shooting in Florida, those students have been heard. They have been who they are, spoken from their hearts, and given the best they could give - their determination that change must occur, and they must make a difference.

Pope Francis spoke to them in his homily this weekend on Palm Sunday: "...you have it in you to shout…It is up to you not to keep quiet. Even if others keep quiet, if we older people and leaders -- so often corrupt -- keep quiet, if the whole world keeps quiet and loses its joy, I ask you: Will you cry out?"

Will you cry out? As a writer, as a human being, will you offer that which no other human being can offer the world?

Today I witnessed magic. A DVD came in the mail, and I stopped everything to put it in and watch it. It was Robin and Mark and Richard III, and if you’ve not heard of it that’s not so surprising. It’s a Canadian documentary in which the late theatre director Robin Phillips works with Canadian comic actor Mark McKinney on playing William Shakespeare’s Richard III, the title character of the play. It's only sold in Canada as far as I can tell, and it's wonderful.

Robin Phillips, photo by V Tony Hauser

The first time I saw Robin’s work was in the summer of 1978 at the Stratford Festival of Canada. That was the summer he directed Maggie Smith and Brian Bedford in As You Like It and Noël Coward’s Private Lives, among other things. Those were the two shows that made me determined to go, and the entire week was immersion in some of the greatest theatre I’d ever seen.

Maggie Smith and Brian Bedford in As You Like It, Stratford, 1978

At the time I had no idea what made Robin’s work unlike anyone else’s – all I knew was that during the intermission of As You Like It I had to get out of the theatre and away from people. I felt raw and fragile and had never experienced Shakespeare quite like that before.

Martha Henry and Alan Scarfe in Love's Labour's Lost, Stratford 1979

The next year Maggie Smith and Brian Bedford weren’t there, but Robin’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost made an impression that is still as fresh in me as the first time I saw it (I went back and saw it another three or four times that season). Before the play even began, you walked into the theatre and there were actors on the stage, and from their actions, their energy, you knew it was a hot, languorous afternoon and no one wanted to do anything.

When I met Robin a few years later, I told him how powerfully I’d been affected by Love’s Labour’s Lost. It wasn’t the stars, wonderful as they had been, it was how he wove together the individual notes of each actor into a symphony of performance.

The DVD I watched today shows how that magic occurs, or at least, it gives glimpses. The truth is, the magic isn’t just Robin, it’s Robin and Mark and what they each bring to the character of Richard III. And partway through, Christine joins them and brings her own magic to the mix. Martha Burns and Susan Coyne, both of them acted at Stratford when I went there, came up with the idea and completed the film shortly before Robin died.

In both films Robin quotes Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale – his favorite line of Shakespeare he says: It is required you do awake your faith. That was and is the magic. Robin had a gift for awakening faith – in actors, in an audience, in the world.

What is it that makes you read a book? What makes you pick up a novel and keep going? Do you look at the first line, or the back cover? Do you flip to the end? Do you start with the first word and work your way through to the end, no matter what, or do you stop if you get bored, or upset, or angry?

As I’ve mentioned more than a few times on this blog, I tend to re-read books, over and over again. Lately I’ve made a serious effort to read books I haven’t read yet, and to read some newer, more recent books. I still love my old friends, and now I’m getting to know some new friends as well. I’m going to share some thoughts about three books I’ve read recently and what prompted me to read them and stay with them.

The book I just finished about an hour ago is Free Falling by G.G. Wynter. It’s a romance, and I’ve been reading those since I cut my teeth on Emilie Loring and Georgette Heyer. Romance are different today in some ways. They move at a much faster pace, yet the basic elements of a good romance – great characters to root for, great conflict to keep them apart, and great chemistry. And it doesn’t hurt if there is some humor along with the heat.

I picked this up because I read a post by the author on the Writer Unboxed website. I also met her at the WU UnConference about a year and a half ago and hoped I would like her book as much as I liked her. (I did.) The first line grabbed me from the start: I’ve got five minutes, three blocks, and one chance.

From the first page, I was caught up in the story, caught up in Free’s emotions and the world and the people she loves. By itself, that’s great. When you add a sense of humor that had me laughing out loud at times, and the bass notes of genuine heartbreak and broken dreams, you have a book that I find hard to put down. I have to say also, that there were two plot twists that, while they made perfect sense, I didn’t see coming at all. That made it a really satisfying read for me. It left me wishing I could go hang out in the restaurant and the community with the folks from the book.

The next book is one I read not too long ago, André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. This is a different kind of romance, one between two young men, and bittersweet. I’ve not seen the film, though that’s how I heard about the book. It wasn’t the first line that drew me in, it was the voice of the narrator. He is trying to figure out when it started, “it” being the dance between the two of them. He starts by suggesting the moment they met, then something later, then something even later, without ever identifying the moment, because that’s not really the point.

It was eight pages in when I read the passage that made it impossible for me to put it down:

But it might have started way later than I think without my noticing anything at all. You see someone, but you don’t really see him, he’s in the wings. Or you notice him, but nothing clicks, nothing “catches,” and before you’re even aware of a presence, or of something troubling you, the six weeks that were offered you have almost passed and he’s either already gone or just about to leave, and you’re basically scrambling to come to terms with something, which, unbeknownst to you, has been brewing for weeks under your very nose and bears all the symptoms of what you’re forced to call I want.

That was it. I was hooked, and had a hard time putting it down from that point until I finished it.

The third book is not as new as the first two. It was/is an Oprah book club choice, and I owned it for two years without reading it. Then a friend recommended it because it had been very meaningful to her, and I had to read it.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski, explores the world seen primarily through the eyes of a young man who is mute. The dogs bred and raised by his family are integral to the story and to his life, and the relationship between humans and dogs is depicted in a way that is unlike anything I’ve read anywhere else.

*spoiler alert*

I had to put this book down frequently and go away. The sense of foreboding and doom was so strong from the very beginning, it was palpable to me, and made it painful to read. At the same time, it was an incredible, beautiful story, and while it was Shakespearean in theme, it wasn’t necessary to be familiar with Shakespeare to appreciate it. I felt tremendously frustrated at the end. It felt like Edgar became a victim, instead of the hero of his story. I won’t say too much about why, because readers should decide that for themselves. It is not a book about which I could pretend indifference. It was a tough read, and yet it was compelling.

The one thing all three books have in common? I cared. Each one of them inspired some kind of connection with the protagonist and the world he or she inhabited. They were as different as they could be from one another, yet it mattered to me what happened in each one of them.

That will have to be the question I ask as I write – will the reader care about my characters and their world? I hope so.

Today I had jury duty. As it turned out, I didn’t get picked, which made me and the others in our group the envy of the folks who did get chosen. That’s one of the things I discovered today – if my informal survey (i.e., everyone I talked with) is even close to accurate, no one wants to serve on a jury.

Every single person I spoke with and those I overheard discussing it were annoyed or resigned to the inconvenience of being called for jury duty. While I understand the feeling, I also found it both fascinating and surprisingly moving to be a part of the judicial process, and I’m willing to bet there were at least a few others who felt the same way.

The court clerks who handled shepherding all of us (about 150 total) through the day, did it with calm, clarity, and patience. Considering the latecomers, the folks who don’t listen to what’s going on, and those who simply don’t understand, that was pretty remarkable. At midafternoon, the clerk who dismissed about thirty of us thanked us for our service and assured us that our time was not wasted.

The first time we heard about our service was when the judge came in to talk to us about what to expect from the day. He had to have made the same speech many, many times, yet it sounded sincere and not like a canned or memorized talk. He spoke briefly about the Constitution, and the right to have a trial with a jury of our peers, and that we might one day need that ourselves, so it was important that we give that opportunity to others.

It’s easy to laugh because we’ve heard a lot of this since we were kids at school, or we’ve seen it on television. What made this different was, in part, the setting. We were in a room that could be used as a large courtroom, though it was being used as a jury selection room. The other thing that brought a certain gravitas to the proceedings was that the people in charge took it seriously, and yet seemed to enjoy what they were doing.

There was one prospective juror I noticed early in the day, who met my eyes with a scowl on his face. I wasn’t sure if he was just mad about being there, or if I had somehow annoyed him from across the room. He, like me, was in the “non-empaneled” jurors (the ones who didn’t get picked). While we were listening to how we would get paid ($9.00 + mileage) he sat upright with his arms folded tight to his chest and the same scowl on his face. Of course, I’ll never know if he was really angry or just uncomfortable or unhappy about something completely unrelated to jury duty.

The City-County Building on Grant Street in Pittsburgh, where jury selection takes place - the statue of the man on the steps is the late mayor, Dick Caligiuri

Why do I write about this? Because for a brief time, my life stopped and took a detour. It could have been for one day, one week, or even one month. I found myself last night packing a bag with books and munchies to take with me, trying to anticipate anything I might need or want, without taking way too much.

I knew I had little to no control over what would happen. Even if I said I couldn’t do a trial that lasted more than a week because I run a business on my own (which was the longest time I figured I could manage without a problem), they could have said too bad, you’re serving.

As I look back on the day, my primary emotion/sensation was curiosity. I was genuinely interested in how the day was going to play out and was open to whatever happened. In the end, you could say it was uneventful, and that would be true. At the same time, it was a glimpse into another world, the road not taken (I went to law school but never practiced). And it was a day pulled out of my own world, yanked out of my comfortable space and thrust into a room with 150 strangers. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?